Richard Donner

It was optioned by the Donner Company, which is...

What's his name? Dick Donner, who did Lethal Weapon and Goonies.

And his wife.

They optioned the movie, but they wanted to make it into a comedy series.

When it comes to who's daddy, it's chicken.

and heidi likes to refer to me as her superhero because i do a lot of things and try and support in a lot of ways uh and i said you know what this fool has kryptonite wrapped around so this is like superman in like the richard donner one when he's got like the the chain around his neck of kryptonite like that's where i'm feeling right now on the recording of this.

I feel wrapped up.

I hear you, man.

Well, maybe he should have been.

The production of Superman II hit an impasse when Richard Donner was fired from the sequel, and in order to garner a bona fide director's credit, the new hire, Richard Lester, completed the film and reshot Donner's parts.

This meant yet another rewrite of the script, this time by the Newmans, but they still used some of Benton's material.

So even though he wasn't credited, Benton should have been, which means that the films had two Oscar-winning writers, Puzo and Benton.

Mm.

Reminded me a little bit of Richard Donner in that regard.

Mm.

Yeah.

That didn't quite work out.

There are previous episodes of this podcast that go into that, Episode 152 on Superman and Episode 231 on all of the Superman sequels, including the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2.

But back to Zemeckis and Gale, because having decided their film would indeed start in the future, they faced the monumental task of shaping the future of Hill Valley.

They decided early on it wasn't going to be Orwellian, and they also knew that they couldn't accurately predict the future.

I'll give it a B+.

I mean, I love action films, and this is a really good one, obviously with Mel Gibson, directed by Richard Donner.

You know, it's a really good action film, but it's not stupid enough to be a great action film, and it's not smart enough to be a great ordinary film.

So, what did I give it? A B? Yeah, B+, whatever.

But a number of Hodges scenes remain in the movie, including scenes at the factory and at the military school and also the dinner where Aunt Marion talks about separating the boys.

Richard Donner, director of the first movie, was asked to return but was off to bigger and better things because of the success of the first film.

He was shooting Superman at this time.

And ironically, he would be replaced as the director on Superman 2.

So I really, really I liked that because, again, as much as Zod is a supervillain and he's a macho guy and he wants to solve problems with his fist or whatever, there's always been the political element to Zod.

And credit to other people that have done Zod content and other mediums, including Richard Donner, where we see Zod and Ursa and I can't remember the other guy's name, the mute guy.

We see them just briefly at the beginning of the first Superman film and then obviously in Superman 2, which a lot of people like.

Or